Jessen & Richter (Eds.) (63 page)

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E N Z O F I M I A N I

certificate of a new power before it had already been firmly established.

Nor has a plebiscite ever led to the downfall of an established power. Mus-

solini was well aware of this and, on December 8, 1928, he announced to

the already
fascistized
Chamber of Deputies that the assembly would be dissolved and that there would soon be a plebiscitary election, declaring

that “a revolution can be consecrated by a plebiscite, but never over-

thrown” (Mussolini 1957, 272). The affirmative result, however, proved to

be useful in conferring a
surplus
of legitimacy and a gloss of legality, neither of which were indispensable, to the new structure of power.

So, modern forms of
election-plebiscite
have never caused or solved,
by
themselves
, a crisis in the system. If anything, they have offered those able to exploit them the advantages of a useful (and often necessary) mechanism

for smoothing over potentially critical stages. They might also have served

to emphasize highly
symbolic
steps on a path that in any case had already been embarked upon, but whose general direction had not yet been alto-gether consolidated. An example of this is the Fascist plebiscite of 1929,

held shortly after the extraordinary boost of legitimacy offered by the Con-

cordat with the Catholic Church, or the double Nazi votes of November

1933, which symbolized the
liberation
of the “new Germany” from the

hated “order of Versailles”. These political instruments helped to reinforce,

exalt and—in a certain sense—crystallize the prerogatives of power that

had already been established by various means—even illegal and coercive,

of course. This helps to explain other typical features of the plebiscites,

which often resulted from the power of a
fait accompli
: the prevalence of affirmative votes, almost always verging on 100 per cent, and the high

numbers of voters, exceeding those of normal elections (Pavone 1996,

162–63).

According to such an interpretation, it is easy to understand why Fas-

cism and Nazism—although not plebiscitary dictatorships
tout court
—gave

such importance to elections and plebiscites in the array of instruments

that democratic tradition had provided for them to legitimize themselves

from the base upwards and to consolidate
consensus
through the exploitation of propaganda. At the same time, however, one can see how the two

regimes studiously avoided giving the impression that they depended on

the whims of the voters. Risky moments, above all for Nazism, were

solved first with the power of the
fait accompli
: an example is when the Nazis abandoned the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference, not to mention the unscrupulous exploitation of Hindenburg’s death

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243

in 1934, after the assassins of June 30 had settled their scores within the

Party; or when the
Wehrmacht
, which had entered the Rhineland in 1936,

swept over the Austrian border two years later and subsequently occupied

Sudetenland. Only at a later stage were such manoeuvres showered with af-

firmative votes in a popular ballot: in Germany, between action and poll, a

mere month passed, then twenty days, then three weeks, then a month and,

finally, just under two months.

In the case of the Italian dictatorship, it may be said that both the

“closed authoritarian elections” of 1924 and the plebiscitary experiments

of 1929 and 1934 in a regime of “zero competitive elections”8 took place

within a sphere of
normal
rhythms of consolidation and public recognition of Fascist power; they were not resounding turning points or held to reject

hypothetical destabilizing impulses. To be sure, a couple of events that

occurred before the polls had had a key role in the founding moments of

the regime. The electoral law passed in November 1923 (giving the relative

majority party two thirds of the seats in Parliament) and then the Concor-

dat with the Catholic Church of February 11, 1929 (solving the age-old

Roman question
) were two decisive steps that had preceded popular sanction at the polls. Elections and plebiscites, at that point, took on a sort of
certify-ing
role in the transformations that had been initiated. It was only the polls of 1924 that constituted a
picklock
capable of sanctioning Fascist dictatorial power and of opening the doors to totalitarian rule.

Electoral Campaigns and Reception of the Idea of Plebiscites

Ernst Jünger (1993, 249) wrote that, in the Germany of the early thirties,

the “election days […] felt like rehearsals for a general mobilization for a

civil war”. In effect, although they declared that they were not dependent

on the whims of the people, Nazism and Fascism used all the persuasion

they were capable of and made every effort in terms of organization and

propaganda to secure crushing victories in all the polls held during their

terms in power. Their election campaigns were short-lived, lasting a maxi-

mum of a few weeks. The two regimes, however, used all the modern po-

litical means in use in the twentieth century, including the
showing-off
and

——————

8 See Werner J. Patzelt in this book.

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E N Z O F I M I A N I

scenography
of the consensus. Albeit to a different degree—Nazism, as we will see, with more radical forms9—they both made use of the obsessive

repetitions of propaganda, technology applied to mass communication, the

new and violent spell-binding oratory of political meetings, the newspaper

graphics, the slogans and enormous posters in every street and on every

wall, the rousing tones of the first talking newsreels and radio shows, the

same many-sided, non-verbal, symbolic messages, expressed in the theatri-

cal gestures of the leaders, the loops and turns of the planes in the sky, and

all the other means of contemporary communication, including photogra-

phy, silent films, propaganda scenes prepared by architects in the main

towns, swooping beams of light on the crowds, and so on.

Fascism reserved for the Italian people at fixed, well spaced-out times,

the need to rally for an affirmative vote for the regime. The German peo-

ple, on the other hand, were assailed in their everyday lives with a sort of

permanent mobilization for electoral purposes; they had to suffer the in-

cessant reiteration of watchwords and icons of the regime, with the result-

ing obligations in public behavior and proofs of fidelity. This was the suf-

focating burden of—to quote from the diary of a contemporary witness—

a “boundless propaganda for a yes-vote” and in general a “colossal propa-

ganda” (Klemperer 2000, 17, 45; Fimiani 2009), which determined a condi-

tion of continuing exceptionality. One of the many slogans was emblem-

atic:
Führer wir folgen Dir! Alle sagen Ja!
, in violent bright-red letters, which gave great visual impact to one of the posters that decked the walls of all

German cities in the November of 1933.10 The watchword, superimposed

on a picture of Hitler in his brown shirt with an icy glare towards a fixed

point in front of him, had in the background a vast crowd of people mak-

ing the Nazi salute. The word
JA
, in particular, was written in large capitals and the exclamation mark made the whole message particularly emphatic.

Fascism used similar means, but they were less extreme. During the

election campaign of 1924, the pressure of intimidation, coercion and

propaganda reached such levels that Giacomo Matteotti made an official

protest in Parliament, as is well-known, and was subsequently assassinated.

In the 1929 polls (but it was the same in 1934), Italian towns, suburbs and

villages were invaded by posters, leaflets, slogans and megaphones urging

——————

9 Many examples now in Omland (2006).

10 www.earthstation1.com/Warposters/jingram/gwwii007;

www.members.tripod.com/~Propagander/dh1.html (“
Führer
we follow you! We all say yes!”).

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people to vote
Sì,
and reminding them of their “patriotic duty” in putting the right ballot into the box, which had the purpose of consecrating the

“organic union” between regime and people, “the moral unity of the Italian

people under the signs of the
Littorio
” (Galeotti 1999, 76).

One of the differences between the two countries, however, lay in the

more convincing and invasive use of color, the efficacy and evocative po-

tency of the slogans, the carefully crafted designs and the very size of the

posters, which produced successful propaganda and a political-publicity

message that homed in. There was no comparison between the impression

that one of these posters on German streets was able to produce on the

onlooker, and the large letters saying
SI
that crowned the face of the
Duce
on the façade of the Fascist Party Headquarters in Rome.11 In Germany,

almost all the posters on view were brightly colored and contained rallying

themes. Besides, although the
Führer
was indisputably the protagonist, Nazi propaganda went beyond the overbearing personality cult of Mussolini that

characterized Fascism. On the one hand, I am thinking in particular of a

huge, imposing, three-quarter portrait of Hitler in his military uniform for

the
Plebiszit
of 1935, standing behind on an imperious
JA!
with its ex-clamatory tones, which was impossible to ignore.12 But, on the other hand,

there were also others that did not have Hitler as the protagonist but that

covered in the same way every available surface with some of the more

typical slogans of the regime (
Das ganze Volk sagt Ja! Am 10. April
,13 or
Ein
fester Block. Ein millionenfaches Ja!
).14

In a few exceptional cases, Fascist propaganda was able to provide ex-

amples that were as powerful as the Nazi ones. Five years after the above-

mentioned posters appeared on the walls of the Party Headquarters in

Rome, the Italian dictatorship called a poll in 1934 on the inseparability of

the
Duce
and
SI
, giving it, however, a spectacular paradigmatic accelera-tion:15 in the second Italian plebiscite, the large, but gray, almost anony-